It's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly.

I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi.

At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.

One of the things about mobile phone is that there's 2 OSes on the phone: one that handles the phone stuff and the other that you as a user actually interact with. What's really scary about it is that the OS we do not think about is often licensed to the manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc.), closed-source, and dated. There's a lot of security firms that sell fake cell towers to law enforcement and governments and that gives them access to all of the data you send over the network. In older formats like 2G there was no encryption on anything sent over the wire.

If you dig into the fake cell tower rabbit hole you'll find what you're talking about to be an even worse problem.

> surveillance state

How do you suppose mobile phones are meant to work without subscriber info?

> I haven't really gotten really into this

Clearly.

Anything billed by the second has good (-enough) cost attribution built in.